Chapter 2/Episode 5: The Boy with the Firewood

A Stranger Brings Wood To The Door And Will Not Look Away

She goes to the kitchen door barefoot with the baby in one arm and her free hand around the iron poker from the stove because the camp has taught her habits she will keep all her life. Pani Bartos is on the stairs in her wrapper, calling down softly, “Pani Stefaniu, is somebody at the door, who is at the door at this hour.”

“I do not know yet, pani.”

“Wait. Wait, I am coming.”

The widow comes down with a lamp, and Stefania holds Mikołaj higher against her shoulder, and Pani Bartos pulls the curtain back from the small window in the kitchen door and looks out and stops, and gives, of all things, a small dry laugh.

“O dla litości boskiej,” she says. “It is the Mazur boy.”

She opens the door.

He is standing on the porch with an armload of split oak up to his chin, two cords of it stacked in the wheelbarrow on the gravel behind him, and snow that has only just begun is salting his hair and his coat collar. He is tall. He is gawky. He is perhaps nineteen or twenty, with a long honest face and a working man’s hands too big for the rest of him yet, and he has the look of a young man who has been raised to take his hat off in front of women, which he does, knocking it against the doorframe in his earnestness.

“Pani Bartos.” He nods to the widow. “My mother said your pile was getting low. She said to bring this over tonight because the weather’s coming in. I’m sorry it’s so late, I had to finish the milking.”

“Joseph Mazur, it is eleven o’clock.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“You should have come tomorrow.”

“Yes, ma’am, but my mother said tonight.”

The widow’s mouth is doing the thing women’s mouths do when they are pretending to be cross with a tall young person they are fond of. Stefania, who has lived in barracks with two hundred women for three years and has learned every register of female disapproval the world contains, recognizes this register at once. The widow is not displeased. She is performing displeasure for the benefit of the boy and now, perhaps, for the girl standing behind her in bare feet with the baby on her shoulder.

“Well, you can stack it on the porch since you have brought it. Quietly. There is a child sleeping.” Pani Bartos turns. “Pani Stefaniu, go back to bed. This is only a neighbor. This is Joseph Mazur from up the road. His family is Polish, his grandfather knew my husband at the cement, do not be afraid.”

But the boy on the porch has seen her, around the edge of the widow, in the kitchen lamplight, and he has stopped.

He has stopped the way a man stops when he has come into a room expecting one thing and has been met by another. He stands with the armload of split oak halfway to where he meant to set it, and he looks at her, and what is in his face is so plain and so without any defense at all that Stefania, who has been a girl among hard men in a hard place, feels the small startled thing she has not felt since before the war. The first undisguised look of a young man who has not yet learned how to look at a young woman without showing his whole life on his face.

The baby on her shoulder makes a soft sleeping sound and shifts and is still.

“Ma’am,” Joseph Mazur says to her, quietly, around the widow. He has lost his English in the way young men lose their English when they are flustered, and the word comes out of him bare. “Evening, ma’am.”

“Dobry wieczór,” Stefania says, because in this country, on this night, even his courtesy is more than she can answer in his language without breaking. Good evening.

He blinks. The widow turns and looks at them both and the look she gives Stefania is brief and inscrutable and a little amused, the look of a woman who has lived in this town her whole life and is not going to be surprised by anything anymore.

“Stack it, Joseph,” Pani Bartos says briskly. “And then good night to you. Tell your mother thank you. Tell her I will send up a jar of the plum next time you come.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He bobs his head. He carries the load past the doorway. He stacks it, and what Stefania will remember of him from this first night, after everything that comes after it, is that he stacks the wood so quietly, so carefully, that she does not hear a single piece of it knock against another. A boy raised to be quiet around a sleeping child even when the sleeping child is not his own. A boy who minded.

When the wheelbarrow goes back down the lane he turns once at the foot of the porch and looks up at the lit window, and Stefania, behind the curtain with the baby asleep on her shoulder, does not pretend that she is not watching him.

He raises a hand. He goes.

The widow comes back inside, locks the door, blows the lamp down. She pauses at the foot of the stairs and looks at Stefania in the new dark.

“Dziecko,” she says quietly, almost gently. “That is a good family, the Mazurs. The boy is a good boy. You may meet him properly on Sunday.”

“Tak, pani.”

“Go to sleep.”

She goes to sleep. She lies down on the quilt with Mikołaj in his basket beside her, and the November snow ticks on the iron roof of the porch, and outside the gravel lane is empty all the way to the bend in the road, and somewhere up the road a tall boy named Joseph Mazur is walking home through the new snow having brought firewood to a widow in the middle of the night because his mother said to and because, perhaps, his mother had heard there was a young woman come from over the water, and Stefania lies in the iron bed of a country that is foreign to her, in a house that is foreign to her, with a baby that the world will be told is hers, and for the first time in three and a half years, in the dark with the snow falling, she lets herself feel the thinnest crack of something open in her that is something other than grief.

She does not call it hope. She is too tired and too smart for the word.

But it is there.